Whipped Cream Difficulties

…water slides.

This is one of those things that I intended to note earlier, but then I got busy and it got past me.

Schlitterbahn and Tyler Miles (the local operations manager for their Kansas City park) were indicted last week on involuntary manslaughter charges. This is related to the death of a ten-year-old boy who was decapitated on the Verrückt waterslide.

Texas Monthly online has a pretty good summary of the indictment and what led up to it. The spin here, based on the criminal indictment, is that these people supposedly had no idea what they were doing.

According to the indictment, lead designer John Schooley “possessed no engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety,” and neither did Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry, whose emails describe a desire to “micro manage” the project because “speed is 100% required.”

Why was speed “100% required”? Allegedly, Henry was trying to impress reality show producers.

…Henry’s statements as quoted in the indictment are troubling. “[Verrückt] could hurt me, it could kill me, it is a seriously dangerous piece of equipment today because there are things that we don’t know about it. Every day we learn more,” he’s quoted as saying. “I’ve seen what this one has done to the crash dummies and to the boats we sent down it. Ever since the prototype. And we had boats flying in the prototype too. It’s complex, it’s fast, it’s mean. If we mess up, it could be the end. I could die going down this ride.”

…

…Henry seems to cast the industry’s guidelines as arbitrary and unnecessary—at one point, he’s quoted as saying, “we’re gonna redefine many of the definables that have been defined in the industry that we couldn’t find good reasons for. Like a 48-inch height rule. Why 48 inches? I could never figure out why not 47 inches. It made no sense to me. And so we’re gonna change all that now in this park, and hopefully change it worldwide in all parks and get back to rational reasonable scientific decisions as to why and how we run our facilities.” Furthermore, the indictment lists twelve different examples of the ride violating standards set by the American Society for Testing & Materials, which creates guidelines for amusement park rides. Schooley signed a document certifying that the ride was in compliance. The indictment describes the netting and support hoops above the ride as “obviously defective and ultimately lethal.”

Kind of burying the lede, and something I didn’t see reported as widely as the first indictment: Henry has also been arrested, and is charged with “murder, twelve counts of aggravated battery, and five counts of aggravated endangerment of a child”. The indictment against Henry hadn’t been released when the TM article hit the web, so indictment details are scanty.

It is worth remembering that most of what’s in the TM story is the prosecution’s case from the indictment, that Henry, Miles and Schlitterbahn have a different story that their lawyers will be presenting at trial, and that all parties should, of course, be presumed innocent.